Could you hack into Mars rover Curiosity?

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NASA’s Curiosity rover has now been on the surface of Mars for just over a week. It hasn’t moved an inch after landing, instead focusing on orienting itself (and NASA’s scientists) by taking instrument readings and snapping images of its surroundings. The first beautiful full-color images of Gale Crater are starting to trickle in, and NASA has already picked out some interesting rock formations that it will investigate further in the next few days (pictures below). Over the weekend and continuing throughout today, however, Curiosity is attempting something very risky indeed: A firmware upgrade.

As we covered last week, at the heart of Curiosity there is a computer that runs VxWorks — a popular embedded operating system that is installed in millions of devices around the world, including many spacecraft, aircraft, the Apple Airport Extreme, Drobo storage devices, and Honda’s ASIMO robot. The VxWorks firmware on any of these systems, including Curiosity, can be updated at any time by uploading a new image and executing a few commands.

In the case of Curiosity, the new firmware was actually transmitted to the rover while it hurtled through space on its 8-month journey to Mars. On Saturday, Sol 5, NASA mission control transmitted the command that begun the update process. “We’ll tell it to activate a sequence to start the load, then we go out of contact [with the rover] and it’s gone for about eight hours,” says Steve Scandore, a senior flight software engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to Computerworld. “We start the upgrade. It will perform a series of steps and then it will turn itself off. It will wake itself up the next day and there’s a down link to see what was done the day before.” We should know later today if the upgrade process has been successful. Similar firmware upgrades have been performed before: Both the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers had their software updated in 2007 (both were powered by VxWorks), and Voyager 2, which is currently 9 billion miles from Earth, had its firmware fixed in 2010.

The first high-resolution color image from Curiosity's MastCam, of Gale Crater, Mars. Click to zoom in.

As for why NASA is executing the world’s most risky firmware update on a computer that’s 250 million miles away from Earth, get this: They’re replacing Curiosity’s operating system with a version that’s more optimized for exploring the surface of Mars. At launch, Curiosity was loaded up with software that specialized in guiding the spacecraft to Mars and performing the complex EDL (entry, descent, landing) procedure. Now that Curiosity has landed, the guidance computer is no longer required — and so it’s being replaced with software that improves autonomy; more powerful computer vision, pathfinding, instrument analysis, and so on.

Hacking Curiosity

All of this led me to an interesting thought: What’s to stop other people from sending firmware updates to Curiosity? There have been many examples of amateur (and possibly state) actors misusing orbiting satellites — so why should Curiosity be any different? The short answer is, it isn’t.

In theory, Curiosity is hackable — and it wouldn’t even be all that hard.

Full-resolution color image of the wall of Gale Crater, on Mars, taken by MSL Curiosity

The first approach would involve the would-be hacker building the equivalent of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), a worldwide network of big-dish antenna that send and receive spacecraft signals, and perform radio astronomy. To perform uplink communications (to the rover), the DSN’s biggest antennae — 230-feet (70-meter) dishes — are outfitted with transmitters that deliver up to 400 kilowatts of output power. The hacker would also have to replicate the exact same encoding scheme (probably QPSK, the same as satellite TV) and use the same frequency (X band, around 8GHz).

With enough careful observation of NASA’s own transmissions, and full reverse engineering of the communication protocol and the rover’s command format, a hacker could gain access to Curiosity with his own antenna. Realistically, though, this approach could only be pulled off by a well-funded terrorist group or state-funded agency.

Some interesting rock formations on the Mars surface, revealed by Curiosity's descent rockets

A much easier approach would be to hack into NASA and use its infrastructure to take over Curiosity. In theory, you could break into mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and issue your own commands via the DSN antennae. Likewise, you could physically break into mission control and upload some new firmware (which, of course, like a generic action movie, you’re carrying on a seemingly innocuous USB stick).

Back in March, NASA announced that it was the victim of 47 advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks, 13 of which gave Chinese hackers access to NASA’s internal network [PDF]. In one case, the login credentials of 150 NASA employees were stolen, which could later be used to access other secure systems. In another attack, the hackers gained complete control of a NASA system, allowing them to delete or modify files, upload hacking tools, and modify system logs to conceal their actions.

In a separate incident, NASA had 48 “mobile computing devices” stolen between 2009 and 2011 — one of which contained International Space Station control codes. It isn’t hard to see how these attack vectors could be combined to brick Curiosity, or block NASA’s access.

The saving grace, I suppose, is that it isn’t really in anyone’s interest to interfere with Curiosity. The scientific data being gathered by Curiosity will benefit everyone — and indeed, the rover itself isn’t 100% American, anyway: There are instruments on board that have been provided by other countries, such as Russia, Canada, and Spain. In all likelihood, the only real risk stems from China — but again, China is just as interested in Curiosity’s findings as the rest of us.

In short, then, it’s possible to hack Curiosity — but it would take more effort than it’s worth. Once we actually get around to colonizing other planets, though — the great Imperial Space Race of the 31st century, or what have you — then I suspect sabotage will be much more likely. By then, I hope NASA will have stringent security measures in place, as I really don’t want to end up drifting through space aboard a bricked spacecraft.

1 question, what would be the point? unless the rover’s flash drive stored the entire credit card credentials of the whole of earth in one big database then im sure it is pretty safe lol

http://twitter.com/ms0n Mark O’Neill

Make it drive all over the place and do wheelies and get some SWEET AIR!!! Can you imagine a frontflip 360 on that thing? I can.

http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

Heheh. With a max speed of 90 meters per hour, it would be some very, very slow wheelies :P

quiop

You obviously do not understand “hackers” because that is a very stupid question.

FF222

Please read up about code signing, asymmetric cryptography and such before posting such a bull article. Or better don’t write tech articles at all if you have no clue about how computers work.

In short: even if the hackers could take control of all NASA systems or even physically occupy and control the NASA facility itself sending signals to the rover, if they had no access to a signing hardware (which is usually stored off-site and even more heavily guarded) specifically associated with the rover, they couldn’t update its firmware, because the device, even if it would receive the update signal, would simply reject it.

Actually, you can’t usually do that (ie. upload any non-signed firmware update) to most $100 cellphones either. Let alone talk about a $2.5 billion Mars rover.

Jerome Haltom

It would honestly not surprise me if it did not use signing, but simply a CRC check. Key verification on a machine where every CPU cycle counts for actual science, that can only be hacked by some very sophisticated governments? Not worth it.

Aaron Shumaker

People like you are the kind that try to rationalize why their forum admin account doesn’t need a strong password, because “Not worth it” since you figure no one would be interested in your forum, and a week later it’s filled with porn ads and malware links all posted in your name. For a project so expensive, you can’t try to hedge your bets on the hope that no one simply wants to. There are plenty of hardware based ways to implement verification that would not cost any CPU cycles and would involve no more than on tiny chip. In all likely hood there is a public key on the rover which is the pair of a private key at NASA which it uses to verify digital signatures.

FF222

Yeah, because it is more important to have the rover save let’s say a hour of update/signature validation time (if it’s processor is really that slow and the update that big), than to lose it forever in it’s first week of mission to some 10-year old script kiddie (let alone talk from chinese state hackers) sending a fake and even potentially malicious update to it, right?

Not that such a “lengthy” process would seem neccessary to actually validate the update. The available bandwidth to the rover is in the magnitude of only a hundred kilobits per second (ie. 16-20 KB/s), so even with a rather slow processor the rover should be easily able to do signature checking on the fly,

There’s simply no technical reason why any updates – or even control codes and commands – sent to the rover shouldn’t and couldn’t be secured by digital signatures.

http://profile.yahoo.com/6A67VV5HRKSCETZWQI2GAN7BT4 ed

This times a million. You would need to have physical access to the inside of a secured military facility, and even then there would be no guarantee of success. I love how the article says, “In theory, Curiosity is hackable — and it wouldn’t even be all that hard.” Then talks about how the hacker could just build their own Deep Space Network and ‘figure out’ how to use it. Good luck on that. It’s not like 100’s of PHDs spent tens-of-thousands of man hours figuring out how to get a clean signal all the way to Mars or anything.

If you want something from a highly secured area, you just have to ask/bribe the right person to get/implant something for you.

Barzia Tehrani

You can get information in one way or another with only one person cooperating, but to take control of equipment you need many people cooperating not just one. To get the firmware update to MSL, at least 40 people are involved. Not only you need to have all of them supporting, you also need to make sure no one else notices.

http://www.facebook.com/mra99 Matthew Ryan Alston

True, there is always one employee in a workplace who is disgruntled because he feels he has been wronged in some way (bad evaluation, team favoritism, etc). That would be the easiest person to target.

Bill Vincent

All security is false. Since any security precaution is, by nature, the result of knowledge gained from past experiences, anything new that hadn’t been considered by those who made the security will circumvent that security. All it takes is resources, imagination and determination. Someone kicks in your front door, so you install a tougher door. They break a window. You put bars on the windows, they go in through the skylight. You put bars on the skylight, they cut the bars. You install tougher bars, they tunnel up through the floor, ad nauseum.
While someone “hacking” Curiosity is ridiculously unlikely, a properly determined and resourced group could do it, though as suggested in the article, anyone with enough tech-mindedness to attempt such a thing is fascinated by the project, and probably wouldn’t screw with it.

Aaron Shumaker

Author clearly knows nothing about hacking. This article is the analogy of saying “You can hack into IBM, just need to get a computer, a modem, and internet.”

http://hackertarget.com/ i_hack_sites

Interesting to note that the software running on it is VxWorks and back in 2010 HD Moore (of Metasploit fame) released research on security vulnerabilities in vxworks software. Lets hope NASA read the research. :)

Looks like the photo was “Redacted” !!! Don’t want us to see the Martians !!!

Barzia Tehrani

– Build a copy of DSN, well that is 100 millions and take several years in large spaces.
– Hack into NASA artwork. Well lets say it is possible, who is going to schedule tracking with one of the DSN equipment that is in work 24/7?

It is not only mission control, but to get tracking going one needs to take control of the DSN tracking control rooms and its assets. One needs to take a DSN asset away from an operator who is monitoring it 24/7 in tracking one of the many deep space missions.

The bottom line is: as far as we have people watching each track and each resource, a hacker (even if able to take control of all systems) still cannot do anything without notice. And for update software on mars, it takes hours, vary longer than what it takes an operator to shut down an asset that is no longer in control and running with someone else control.

http://www.facebook.com/karl.stromberg.73 Karl Stromberg

NASA has been doing remote firmware updates since at least the Voyager probes were launched. Why is this news?

troller

imgoing to hack nasa

jkgaj

It’d be simpler to send a missile to Mars that will destroy Curiosity.

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